My Students, My Teachers — Forty years of stories from a teacher who believed that every lesson worth remembering began with a human being, not a textbook.
She was ten years old when I first met her — twinkling eyes, boundless energy, sitting right in the front row as though she had personally reserved it. Prerna was petite and sweet, curious about everything, and possessed of a meticulousness that was, in a child that age, almost startling. She was every teacher’s quiet dream: the student who nods at the right moment, whose reflective questions deepen a discussion rather than derail it, who makes you want to reach further into a poem than you had planned.
She was a true all-rounder — debater, dancer, actress, athlete, all with the same unforced enthusiasm. Some children are good at several things; Prerna was fully present in all of them. I appreciated her enormously, and I told her so, perhaps more easily than I noticed when I fell short of deserving her in return.
On one occasion, Prerna — a trained classical dancer — took it upon herself to choreograph and rehearse her classmates for an inter-house dance competition. It was a generous, ambitious undertaking for a ten-year-old. She gave it everything she had.
I watched the rehearsal and offered my feedback. The movements, I said, needed to be more refined. They were too jerky. I said it with the easy authority of someone who believed she was being helpful, and I did not pause to consider what those words might cost the child who had spent weeks coaxing non-dancers to move with grace.
I did not see the effect on her face. Or perhaps I did, and did not read it carefully enough.
Months later, on Children’s Day, the teachers decided to entertain the school — a light-hearted reversal of the usual order, the staff taking the stage for once. Most joined in cheerfully and without pretension. I was young, energetic, and rather more enthusiastic in my movements than the occasion perhaps required.
Prerna watched from the audience. Afterwards, quietly, she remarked to someone nearby: “Aren’t the steps as jerky as ours were?”
The words reached me. And when they did, they landed with a precision that no formal reprimand could have matched. She had not said them to wound me — she was ten, and she said what she observed, as she always did. But the truth in them was exact and complete. I had criticised her choreography from the comfortable distance of someone who had never tried to do what she had done. I had looked at the outcome and missed the effort entirely.
It was, I understood then, a failure of imagination as much as anything else. I had not asked myself what it takes to train a group of children who have never danced, to shape something out of nothing, to give of what you know so that others might feel it too. Dance does not come naturally to everyone. Prerna knew this better than I did. She had lived it in those rehearsals, with every stumbling classmate she patiently guided through a step.
She taught me, without intending to, the difference between judging a result and honouring an effort. It is a distinction I have tried not to forget.
Years later I met her again — at her Sangeeth, the evening of music and celebration before her wedding. She was exactly as I remembered: bubbly, warm, luminous with the particular happiness of someone entirely at home in the moment.
And then she danced.
Among the customary dancing of relatives, Prerna moved with a grace that drew every eye in the room. I watched and could not look away. The classical training, the years of practice, the discipline beneath the lightness — all of it was there, unhurried and complete. And alongside the pure pleasure of watching her, something quieter surfaced: the memory of a rehearsal, a careless remark, and the small, clear-eyed girl who had answered it in the only way that mattered.
She had gone on and done the work. The steps were anything but jerky now.
Appreciate the effort before you assess the outcome. A teacher who has never tried the thing she is criticising would do well to remember that before she speaks.